Fan art on envelopes was encouraged by the Grateful Dead with promises of free tickets for the best artwork. The Grateful Dead Archive has opened to the public on the University of California Santa Cruz's McHenry Library this week.

Photo: Sean Culligan, The Chronicle

Fan art on envelopes was encouraged by the Grateful Dead with...

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A sculpture of Jerry Garcia's hand sits outside of the museum entrance. The Grateful Dead Archive has opened to the public on the University of California Santa Cruz's McHenry Library this week.

Photo: Sean Culligan, The Chronicle

A sculpture of Jerry Garcia's hand sits outside of the museum...

Image 3 of 4

Nicholas Meriwether stands at the Grateful Dead's conference table by some of his favorite pieces in the museum on Wednesday, June, 20, 2012. The Grateful Dead Archive has opened to the public on the University of California Santa Cruz's McHenry Library this week.

Photo: Sean Culligan, The Chronicle

Nicholas Meriwether stands at the Grateful Dead's conference table...

Image 4 of 4

The Grateful Dead Archive has opened to the public on the University of California Santa Cruz's McHenry Library this week.

A right hand missing a middle finger reaches out toward the reference desk in the main library at UC Santa Cruz.

Any Grateful Dead fan will instantly recognize this sculpture as the strumming hand of Jerry Garcia. Minus the digit from the wood-chopping accident, the hand seems to be grabbing for his followers to pull them into Room 2120 at McHenry Library, heretofore known as Dead Central.

A repurposed classroom with glass walls, Dead Central is the 1,400-square-foot display case for the Grateful Dead Archive. It opens to the public Friday with a free concert on the green outside the library by Moonalice, a jam band that borrows from the Dead's improvisational style.

The accompanying exhibit, "A Box of Rain: Archiving the Grateful Dead Phenomenon," comes four years after Bob Weir and Mickey Hart held a news conference at the Fillmore in San Francisco to announce that the band's collection would be donated to UC Santa Cruz. Two years later, counterculture historian Nicholas Meriwether was culled from 400 applicants to fill the position of Grateful Dead archivist. Two years after that he stands next to Garcia's hand to begin a tour of what is formally named the Brittingham Family Foundation Dead Central, on account of a $500,000 donation.

"What I'm doing is reconstituting the archive that never was," says Meriwether, 47. "They were a working band. They weren't sentimental about their history, and the idea of archiving it the way I am doing here was not something they were going to put their money behind or put their time into."

To avoid disappointment, there are two things a visitor should know before walking through the door. The first is that the Dead Central logo - which combines the University of California symbol of an open book with the rose from "American Beauty" - is not available on a T-shirt. There will be a tie-dyed Dead Central T-shirt for sale, but it bears the banana slug mascot that John Travolta wore in "Pulp Fiction."

The second thing to know is that this is a scholarly archive, not a museum. The materials come from band headquarters in San Rafael, not from the homes of the musicians. You won't find "Wolf" or "Rosebud" or any of the 25 guitars that Garcia played, and you won't find one of his baggy black performance T-shirts, either. There is no musical component, and the only electric guitar and amp on display belonged to a Stanford professor working on a prototype with Bob Weir.

Papers donated

What the Dead donated was 600 linear feet of office papers and the conference table the musicians sat at while shuffling those papers. The Dead papers have attracted the supporting collections of Dennis McNally, the band's publicist and historian, and the late Dick Latvala, the keeper of the vault of concert tapes known as "Dick's Picks."

The bulk of the collection is housed on a different floor of the library. Meriwether doesn't know how many items there are and won't know for years. Stuff keeps coming in. Thousands of items have been cataloged, from which 250 have been selected for this opening show. These include concert posters, photos, ticket stubs, backstage passes, song lyrics and chords on binder paper, and enough ephemera to merit its own category, which Meriwether calls "Deadheadiana."

"What we're trying to do with the exhibit is introduce the major sections of the archive," he says.

This introduction starts with a note from Garcia, handwritten and shaky, detailing his upbringing at 87 Harrington St. in the Excelsior district of San Francisco.

From there, wall text takes the story to Palo Alto, where Garcia and Bob Weir formed the Warlocks to play pizza-parlor gigs in 1965. Then it comes back to San Francisco, where they became the house band for Ken Kesey's "acid tests."

Just below the wall text is a Funk & Wagnall's with the phrase Grateful Dead highlighted by a box and arrows. This is the source for the band's name change, which suggests that this dictionary belonged to Garcia and he excitedly boxed in the phrase. But no member of the band had anything to do with it. The book belonged to a Deadhead, which doesn't make it any less authentic, the way Meriwether sees it.

"The key to the band and the phenomenon is the degree to which it reached out to and included its fans," he says.

Some of these fans have written doctoral dissertations, and the bound volumes are behind glass. The title on one thick treatise jumps out: "Collective Expressions in Negotiated Structures: The Grateful Dead in American Culture, 1965 to 1995," by Geoffrey W. Bradshaw, University of Wisconsin, 1997.

'Blues for Allah'

At the far end of the gallery is a dark anteroom outfitted with three church pews and the stained glass of "Blues for Allah," which hung in band headquarters for years. There is a screen at one end, and you'd think this is the place to sit down to some concert footage. It isn't.

What you see instead is Craig Corwin of Pacifica reading a three-page letter that Garcia wrote to him, in response to fan mail Corwin sent after a concert in Sacramento, in 1966. In it, Garcia details the founding and philosophy of the band, with mention of the musical background and strengths of the five original members.

Corwin's letter is not part of the collection, but there are plenty that are. The decorated envelopes run to 14,000, which means there might be thousands of Deadheads squeezing through here to watch the tape loop and wonder why Garcia never answered their letter and why they are not the one on the screen at Dead Central.